7 Responses

Does the amount of followers a wrestler has equate to a push? Maybe they should have Twitter rankings, whereby popular wrestlers get title shots each month. RTs get you promo time and if you lose followers you get “heat”, dirty looks from the brass and you job to Fandargo.

Considering that it’s possible to “buy” 50,000 Twitter followers for around $0.05 – $0.10 per follower, that’s not much of an accomplishment. Of course, all social media usage is completely legit and certainly not subject to manipulation at all, right?

I love how the number of followers one has is the major statistic of the 20-teens. We’re going to look back at this in 20-30 years and wonder why we were so stupid.

@Captain Ass: I never said he bought any. I said that followers can be bought. They can also be created. There’s also a slowly and quietly growing reason for the WWE to do exactly that if they felt like it (and I’m not sure if they are one way or the other)…it’s a selling point. The WWE just demonstrated that with the tweet…they’re marketing the fact that their superstars are “gaining” followers.

When Twitter themselves estimate the number of fake accounts at 10% (and that’s just what they can detect) and the fact that mass purchasing of fake accounts exists (not to mention mass creation to begin with), it invalidates any claims any of the social networks or the people use them make about followers or users or any other so-called metric that they utilize.

Why wouldn’t they want people to know that one of their top stars is gaining more Twitter followers? WWE doesn’t have an investment in Twitter, they merely benefit from each others existence. I think most people who are half way intelligent know what the legit Twitter accounts are for the wrestlers. The main way to find out is simply to watch WWE programming, as they normally post their official Twitter handle for each star when he/she comes out to the ramp and to the ring.

I don’t think you and I are talking about the same thing, dude. You’re right…the WWE makes it really easy to figure out which Twitter accounts belong to the wrestlers. But what they don’t (and probably can’t) do is figure out which of the follower accounts are legit and which are fake. Some can be guessed at easily enough, but not all of them, and it would be pretty easy to bury some fakes in there without anyone really catching on. I’m not saying the WWE is doing this, but the problem of fake accounts is prevalent enough to render the statistic meaningless. There’s no conclusive way to tell whether the followers are 100% legit followers, so while the WWE should want people to know that their superstars seem to be getting attention, we in turn need to stand back and ask questions such as, “okay, so what? Are these people actually talking to the Superstars? Is this effort increasing WWE revenues? What is a whole bunch of people following a Twitter account really telling us?” I don’t believe it’s worth much of anything, myself.

This is the big problem with “Internet marketing”…if a statistic or measure is put in the public eye, the marketers will do anything and everything they can to manipulate it. They tried it with Alexa, they tried it with Google PageRank, they’ve tried it with several other things, and they’re trying it here.